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Shimon Schocken is a professor and founding dean of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science at IDC Herzliya in Tel Aviv. He starts out with some of his life story, introducing us to his grandfather, Salman Schocken, who dropped out of school aged 14 to help feed the family. He went on to found “a glittering empire of department stores,” every store building a “jewel of Bauhaus architecture.” Salman was the ultimate self-learner, a man who surrounded himself with an entourage of young, unknown scholars to enable their writing and learn from them. (The fact that said entourage included the likes of Franz Kafka likely didn’t hurt.)

In the late 1930s, Salman fled Germany, leaving everything behind and spending the rest of his life in a relentless pursuit of art and culture, ending his life as a scion of society. “Such is the power of self-study,” says Schocken…